[whatwg] Re: Rendering Unknown Elements and IE Support

[Lachlan Hunt]

Jim Ley wrote:
> On Sun, 04 Jul 2004 12:05:24 +1000, Lachlan Hunt
> <lachlan.hunt at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> 
>> Normally, they wouldn't let us use anything that 90% of their
>>audience won't get any benefit from either, but if Web Apps, Web Forms
>>and Web Controls offers a clear benefit over supporting IE, then I think
>>that situation could change quite rapidly. 
> 
> What are Web Controls offering you - remember 90% don't see anything
> but the degraded state.

   I said *if* they offer a clear benefit over supporting IE.  I didn't 
say they currently /are/ offering me anything, I'm just open to the 
possibility that they might.  However, at this stage I'm skeptical that, 
even with the backwards compatibility that is supposed to be offered by 
web forms, they will get widely used simply because all new input types 
will degrade to text fields, which is no better than what authors can 
currently do.

   However, if there is a clear benefit for using these than existing 
technologies currently supported by IE, there's a chance that authors 
may start encouraging their users to upgrade to a descent browsers which 
would benefit every web developer, not just those wanting to use 
web-forms/apps/controls.

> (unless you're going to go to your managers and explain
> how you're going to add the cost of supporting a large
> script library.)

   I'm not happy about having to support a large script library just to 
make some controls work in IE, but if there is a *clear benefit* for it, 
then it's possible that authors will use the scripts, especially if 
they're readily available and easiy to implement.

>>That's why I don't think the WHATWG should make the 
>>extensions to HTML, rather than just an XHTML module.
> 
> Why have an XHTML module at all?

   What?  Well, I'm going to interpret this question as being /why have 
an XHTML module for web apps, web forms and web controls?/, because I 
don't think we're talking about the benefits of XHTML modularization.

   While I don't necessarily agree with extending the HTML 4 forms, and 
would prefer encouraging the use of XForms, I do agree that there should 
be a additional markup that is more suited to web applications. 
Semantic structures to markup those commonly used in web applications 
would be very useful, and would be much betther than trying to get 
authors to use semantic elements which are more well suited to documents.

   I think these extensions should be implemented as XHTML modules, as 
specified in XHTML modularization, however it may also be good if it was 
extended to a completely standalone markup language, seperate from 
XHTML; although there are features that will be common between documents 
and web applications (such as hyperlinks, embedded objects/images, 
scripting, etc. so it may be best to keep them combined as modules.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt

http://www.lachy.id.au/
lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au